In act one of the opera The Queen of Spades, engineer officer Herman (a German by nationality accotding to Pushkin) sings to his friend Count Tomsky (Herman, apparently, is the hero’s name. Tomsky is a surname, a strange liberetto was written by P.I. Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest Ilyich) about his love for a certain beauty, whose name he does not know and does not want to know, because for such a “divine unearthly being” human names are too materially low and carnally mundane.

At the same time, he does not hide his by non divine-spiritual desire “to make love with her”!

So he sings:

“But the jealous thought that she

will by another to possess…”

And now I suggest that readers make a kind of mental somersault-mortalle jump and recall A. Vertinsky’s song “I am a little ballerina…” And compare the melody of this part of Herman’s aria and “I am a little ballerina.” It’s almost a one-to-one musical coincidence!

Wittingly or unwittingly, Vertinsky borrowed this musical motif from Tchaikovsky.

He’s not the first, he’s not the last.

I have already written more than once about such “coincidences”.

Gounod, for example, borrowed the chorus of soldiers from Verdi’s opera Troubadour in his opera Faust, where the chorus of the guards has a similar melody.

Dargomyzhsky, in The Mermaid, borrowed the Prince’s aria “Involuntarily to these sad shores…” from the same Gounod, from Faust’s aria “Greetings, holy shelter.”

Dvorak repeats the first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in his famous symphony “From the New World”.

Kalman in his operetta “Maritza” COMPLETELY, without hiding, copies the aria of the same Zupan (without even changing his name) from Strauss’s operetta “The Gypsy Baron”.

Varlamov’s romance “The Lonely Sail is turning White” based on Lermontov’s verse, completely coincides musically with the Ukrainian song “The river Dnipr the wide is storming.”

The romance “De amor” is musically borrowed from the Ukrainian song “Night is so Moony”.

Tchaikovsky, in the aforementioned “Queen of Spades”, with Tomsky’s slightly frivolous song “If all lovely girls could fly like birds…” (To Derzhavin’s “Jokes”), clearly musically parodies nothing more than the German national anthem.

This list can be continued almost indefinitely …

But I’ll spare the readers.

Enjoy listening…

22 VII 2025